Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

But there are no new thoughts. They’re just old thoughts born into new moments – and in these moments is the thought: without that earth we are all finished. We couldn’t survive a second without its grace, we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea.

From the space station’s distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night. Mankind is the light of cities and the illuminated

filament of roads. By day, it’s gone. It hides in plain sight.

all beings are living in life-support machines commonly called bodies and all of these will fail eventually.

They could think: no negligible thing could

shine so bright, no far-hurled nothingy satellite could bother itself with these shows of beauty, no paltry rock could arrange such intricacy as fungus and minds. So they sometimes think it would be easier to unwind the heliocentric centuries and go back to the years of a divine and hulking earth around which all things orbited – the sun, the planets, the universe itself. You’d need far more distance from the earth than they have to find it insignificant and small; to really understand its cosmic place. Yet it’s clearly not that kingly earth of old, a God-given clod too stout and stately to be able to move about the ballroom of space; no. Its beauty echoes – its beauty is its echoing, its ringing singing lightness.

It’s not peripheral and it’s not the centre; it’s not everything and it’s not nothing, but it see...

Yet still at times it tilts and pitches. It wants what it wants and hopes what it hopes and needs what it needs and loves what it loves.

An animal that does not just bear witness, but loves what it witnesses.

spaceship of a planet

it’s easier to have nothing much to lose than to keep losing something.

The strongest, most deducible proof of life in the photograph is the photographer himself – his eye at the view-finder, the warm press of his finger on the shutter release. In that sense, the more enchanting thing about Collins’s image is that, in the moment of taking the photograph, he is really the only human presence it contains.

That the ride of your life will pass in an eyeblink, just as life does to the aging brain whose slowing makes everything appear to move faster.

wherever mankind goes it leaves some kind of destruction behind it,

Just her feet dangling above a continent, her left foot obscuring France, her right foot Germany. Her gloved hand blotting out western China.

Time moves on with its usual nihilism, mows us all down, jaw-droppingly insensate to our preference for living.

in the cosmic calendar as it would exist then, all humans ever did and were will be a brief light that flickers on and off again one single day in the middle of the year, remembered by nothing.

Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this

the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.

Out there, electromagnetic vibrations ripple through the vacuum as bodies in space give out light. If these vibrations are translated into sounds then the planets each have their own music, the sound of their light. The sound of their magnetic fields and ionospheres, their solar winds, the radio waves trapped between the planet and its atmosphere.